Writing about Writing is like Learning About Architecture

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An aspect of Bill Kleinsasser’s teachings I found most instructive was his frequent reference to the work of authors and the parallels of their writing process to architectural design. The work of the best writers grants us the ability to question outworn or too-small assumptions and grow our minds. Outstanding architecture likewise provides people with places that measure up to the best they can imagine and hope for, places that are as good as they can and should be. By citing writers he admired, Bill broadened his students’ appreciation for the power of great ideas from the perspective of what is larger and lasting about the human condition. As I said previously, he impressed upon us the value of seeing the world through the eyes of others, those whose ideas we may not have immediately considered relevant to our work.

Bill included the following quotes from renowned authors and poets in several editions of his self-published textbook SYNTHESIS. Bill specifically used these quotes to illustrate several of his own notions about what is required to make good architecture. They provide us with insights about how the writers thought about and approached their work, variously addressing organizational structure, response to place, achieving clarity, establishing vitality, and process in writing. Their pertinence to architectural design is clear.      

Writers on Writing

“It seems plain that the art that speaks most clearly, explicitly, directly, and passionately from its place of origin will remain the longest understood. It is through place that we put out roots, wherever birth, chance, fate, or our traveling selves set us down; but where these roots reach toward . . . is the deep and running vein, eternal and consistent and everywhere purely itself, that feeds and is fed by the human understanding.” (Eudora Welty)
 
“Whatever is significant and whatever is tragic in a place live as long as the place does, though they are unseen, and the new life will be built upon those things.” (Eudora Welty)
 
“I think the end is implicit in the beginning. If that isn’t there in the beginning, you don’t know what you’re working toward. You should have a sense of a story’s shape and form and its destination, all of which is like a flower inside a seed.” (Eudora Welty)
 
“To write simply is as difficult as to be good.” (W. Somerset Maugham)
 
“Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style is no such separate entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable. The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is himself he is approaching, no other; and he should begin by turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style—all mannerisms, tricks, adornments. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.” (E.B.White)
 
“A good style in literature, if closely examined, will be seen to consist in a constant succession of tiny surprises.” (Ford Maddox Ford)
 
“It was when the trees were leafless first in November and their blackness becomes apparent, and one first knew the eccentric to be the base of design.” (Wallace Stevens)
 
“First: I think poetry should surprise by fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost a remembrance. Second: Its touches of beauty should never be halfway, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him the luxury of twilight. But it is easier to think what poetry should be than to write it . . . And this leads me to another axiom: That if poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.” (John Keats)
 
“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything good.” (William Faulkner)
 
“Very young writers often do not revise at all. Like a hen looking at a chalk line, they are hypnotized by what they have written. “How can it be altered?” they think. “That’s the way it was written.” Well, it has to be altered. You have to learn how.” (Dorothy Canfield Fisher)
 
“I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I’m one of the world’s great rewriters.” (James Michener)
 
“The vital difference between a writer and someone who merely publishes is that the writer seem always to be saying to himself “if I am not clear, the world around me collapses.” In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas is a curious anticlimax.” (Alfred Kazin)
 
“Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what one is saying.” (John Updike)
 
“Always, always the last chapter slips out of my hands. One gets bored. One whips oneself up. I still hope for a fresh wind and don’t very much bother, except that I miss the fun that was so tremendously lively all October, November, and December.” (Virginia Woolf)